Shelby Scattergood

Statement

My work has shifted over the years from being a visual narrative of specific personal moments to becoming more of a study of identity as a whole. I'm fascinated with non-linear theories of time and have started exploring a hypothetical version of myself where I have access to all moments of my life (think Amy Adam's character in "Arrival") and what sorts of impacts that would have on free-will and identity. In all my recent portraits I utilize a circular motif that calls to the idea of a neverending string of events - memories revisited, futures influenced, memories influenced, futures revisited. It's also a call to the book "Flatland" in which a flat circle is pulled into the world of a 3D sphere. The circle is given a brief moment to see his world in a dimension previously inaccessible to him. It's an interesting thought experiment on how we (in place of the circles) experience our lives with limited perception. We see the world through a linear string of time, but what if we were granted the ability to see ourselves outside of that limitation? It's a bit strange, but a fascinating hypothetical!

I'm also very interested in the combination of photorealism and abstraction. My portraits are photorealistic drawings of images I've taken through glass. I often edit the colors and will occasionally do some cropping or mirroring, but the drawing generally stays true to the photo. I've always been very drawn to photorealism as I greatly enjoy the process of replication (I love seeing the human error in it too), but I do find photorealism for its own sake a bit bland. For me the control and decided outcome of creating something photorealistically but ending up with an abstracted piece creates this fascinating tension. This tension, I believe, speaks to the flowing nature of identity. From my own personal story, I was recently diagnosed as Autistic after a several year process of addressing my mental health. It led to a really interesting realization of how I've known myself for 30 years and yet didn't understand this massive part of myself. In a way it feels like being reborn. This tension created in my portraits speaks so loudly to me as a representation of this piece of me that was undiscovered. The photorealistic part of the piece is me, it may not make sense at first, but it is in fact a snapshot. I spend all this time creating this image of myself (just like how I live a little bit of my life every day), but when I step back it's hard to say what exactly I'm looking at. The photorealism is me. The abstraction is my perception of it.